General Search Engine Marketing Issues Forum

A friend is asking me about a company (won't mention name) whose products (won't mention names) promote things that sound like SPAM triggers, including cloaking and automatically generated doorways. Am I being paranoid or should I be suspicious of:

"Content optimization allows Internet Publishers to drive traffic to their sites using the essence of the content without ever having to "expose" the original text."

"maximizes your company's visibility, creating thousands of referral points for your site at major Internet portals, promoting "invisible" and "deep" content. " Is this possibly mirroring and doorway/hallway/keyword domain spam?

"By optimizing where in your site customers are delivered—based on what "door" they entered—you can create Web aisles that help to minimize click stream (snip product name) ... allows you to test different landing pages or offers within your site (snip product name) ... gives you the power to automatically reroute traffic to the best-performing page or offer so you can maximize conversions."

This isn't new to me. I know programs are developed to reroute search results landings by automatically re-routing visitors to a completely different page that could possibly be the "better" choice for them to visit on your site based on the keywords that got them to the original landing spot. But, I'm unsure of the ethics of this and how search engines or users feel about this manipulation.

One product promotes making pages available to engines that are normally hidden behind firewalls and not accessible. How ethical is this? What is the need that would drive this task?

Are claims like these to be taken seriously or can these actions prove deadly in the long run for websites?

It really depends on how the company is promoting themselves. If they don't make any mention of optimizing sites with the search engines guidelines in mind, or with the client's long term success in mind, than they can use these techniques with no problem.

If the company in question is promoting themselves as optimizing their clients' websites with long term success and goals in mind, while adhering to some of the major triggers that we know may go off at the search engines from certain practices, than there is something wrong.

Those quotes are some nice ways of saying spam techniques....my favorite is:

>>>>"Content optimization allows Internet Publishers to drive traffic to their sites using the essence of the content without ever having to "expose" the original text."

What a nice way to say you can use invisible text or cloaking.

>>>> how search engines or users feel about this manipulation.

The search engines don't appreciate it.....not at all. I am not sure that half of the users even know that they are being manipulated.